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Bid to Block Postal Service Bill Falls Short in Senate

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday defeated a Republican attempt to block a vote on a bill to save the struggling Postal Service. The vote was 62 to 37.

The Senate had hoped to have a final vote on the legislation on Tuesday, but Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, raised a point of order to try to derail the bill.

Now a final vote could come Wednesday on the wide-ranging measure, which would allow the Postal Service to study the elimination of Saturday deliveries and to provide a broader range of potentially lucrative services like delivering beer and wine for retailers.

The bill would also provide retirement incentives for cutting some of the agency’s 547,000 positions and would restructure benefit programs, including stretching out and reducing payments for the health benefits of future retirees over a 40-year period. Mr. Sessions and three other Republican senators — Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Dan Coats of Indiana and Bob Corker of Tennessee — argued that the bill would add $34 billion to the national debt. The measure would allow the Postal Service to collect $11 billion that the agency overpaid into a pension fund and allow it to defer $23 billion in payments that would go toward its retiree health benefit plan.

The Postal Service said the prepayment to the pension fund had added $20 billion in debt to its balance sheet since 2007. Under the Budget Control Act, passed last year, the Senate is prohibited from bringing legislation to the floor that adds to the deficit.

“I believe we have a moral obligation to not mislead the people who elected us when we said we intend to stay by the limits on increasing debt,” Mr. Sessions said.

But two Republican co-sponsors of the bill — Susan Collins of Maine and Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts — argued that the bill did not violate the Budget Control Act because it was not taking money from federal coffers.

“There is no taxpayers’ money involved,” Ms. Collins said. She also said that any spending in the bill would come from revenue generated by the Postal Service.

After rejecting Mr. Sessions’s effort to block debate, the Senate began work on 39 amendments to the bill, including provisions that would cap bonuses for Postal Service executives and restrict the closing of rural post offices.

A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 2012, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Bid to Block Postal Bill Falls Short In Senate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe